* * *
Letty Nance had been employed by the Cornwall Institute since she was twelve years old. The Sight ran in her family, which to her parents, who had both worked for the Cornwall Institute before her, had always been an honor. To Letty it seemed a cruel joke that the Lord had chosen to allow her to see that the world contained magic, but not to allow her to be part of it.
She had thought the Institute would be an exciting, wonderful kind of place to work. Unfortunately, it wasn’t. Over the years she had come to understand that not all Nephilim were like the ancient Albert Pangborn, too cranky to be kind to the help, and too cheap to even keep the wards up around the Institute properly. Local piskies were always wandering onto the property, and about the only contact with real magic she had most weeks was chasing them out of the garden with a rake while they yelled filthy oaths at her.
Some excitement had come to her at last, though, with the events of two nights before. Pangborn often patrolled the area with a group of younger Shadowhunters—as far as Letty could tell, patrolling meant riding about on horses looking for Downworlders, seeing if they were up to no good, and returning to the Institute to drink when it turned out they weren’t. Some of the Shadowhunters, like Emmett Kelynack and Luther Redbridge, weren’t half bad-looking, but none of them would look at a mundane girl twice, not even one with the Sight.
But two nights ago they’d brought in the old woman. Or at least she seemed old to Letty—not as old as Pangborn; nobody, after all, was as old as Pangborn—but she was scrawny, her light brown hair streaked with gray, and her skin sickly pallid.
The odd thing was that the woman was a Shadowhunter. She had Marks on her, like the others did, black printings of angelic script. And yet they brought her right quick to the Sanctuary and locked her in.
The Sanctuary was a great big stony crypt of a place, where Downworlders came sometimes when they wanted to speak to Pangborn. It doubled, as well, as a makeshift prison. After the old woman was locked up, Pangborn took Letty aside, saying, “Check in on her twice a day, Ms. Nance, and make sure she’s fed. Don’t speak to her, even if she speaks to you. With any luck, she’ll be gone out of here in a day or two.”
Now that, Letty thought, was a bit exciting. A Nephilim who’d done something bad enough to get themselves tossed in prison, and she, Letty, had the keeping of them.
She’d tried to bring her supper in the Sanctuary, and breakfast the next day, but the woman remained insensible, sprawled on the bed and unresponsive to any of Letty’s entreaties or even finger pokes. She had left the food on the table and then come and taken it away again hours later; the woman slept on. Letty hoped that this morning would be better—surely it was not good to sleep for a night and a day—and that the woman would wake and eat. She had to keep up her strength, considering her wounds.
Letty used the largest of the keys on the ring at her waist to open the Sanctuary. Inside the door, four steps led down to the stone floor, and as she descended she saw that the woman—Tatiana Blackthorn, that was her name—was awake, perched on the bed, her legs sprawled out in front of her in a most indecorous way. She was muttering to herself, in a voice too low for Letty to make out words. The supper from last night remained on the table, untouched.
“I’ve brought you some porridge, missus,” Letty said, taking care to make her voice slow and clear. Tatiana’s eyes followed her as she went over to the table. “Just simple porridge with some milk and a bit of sugar.”
Letty almost jumped and spilled her tray when Tatiana spoke. Her voice was raspy, but clear enough. “I was… betrayed. Abandoned by my master.”
Letty stared.
“He promised me everything.” The rasp became a low wail. “Power, and revenge. Now I have nothing. Now I must fear him. What if he comes after me?”
“I wouldn’t know about any of that,” Letty said sympathetically as she set the breakfast tray down. “But it’s my understanding that the safest place around is this here Sanctuary. That’s why they call it that, after all.”
The woman’s tone altered, and when she spoke again, there was a kind of cunning in it. “I would see my children. Why can I not see my children?”
Letty blinked. She didn’t look much like someone who had children. Not what Letty imagined a mother to be. But clearly she was half out of her head. Perhaps she’d been different once.
“You must ask Mr. Pangborn about that,” she said. “Or—I know a Silent Brother is coming soon. Perhaps one of them can help you see your children.” Through bars, she thought, but there was no point saying that.
“Yes.” The woman smiled at that, a peculiar, unsettling smile that seemed to stretch across half her face. “A Silent Brother. I would very much like to see him when he comes.”
* * *
Cordelia hadn’t been looking forward to going to Curzon Street. She had imagined something dim and ghostly, a shadow of the place it had been, with dustcloths over the furniture.
But it was nothing like that. It felt like stepping back into the house as she’d left it. Lights were on—Effie’s doing, no doubt—and it was clean and swept. As she wandered through the rooms, she saw that fresh flowers had been placed on the tables in cut-crystal vases. The chess table was set up in the study, as if waiting for a game, though she could not bear to look in the room for very long. A fire burned low in the hearth.
Perhaps this was worse than dustcloths, she thought, passing into the dining room. On the walls hung the Persian miniatures: one depicted a scene from Layla and Majnun, with Layla standing in the doorway of a tent, gazing out. Cordelia had always liked her expression—yearning, seeking. Looking for Majnun, perhaps, or looking for wisdom or answers to her troubles.
She could feel Layla’s yearning in her own longing for this home. She stood here inside it, and yet it was as if it were a lost place. Everything within it called to her; everything had been selected by James with such care and attention, such determination that she would like it.
What had he been thinking? Cordelia wondered, as she went up the stairs to what had been her room. Had he been planning to get rid of it all when Grace became mistress of the house? The miniatures, the chess set, the Carstairs panels over the fireplace? Or could it be true, what he’d said—that he’d never really planned a life with Grace at all?
But that was a dangerous road to go down. Cordelia found the bedroom, like everything, much as she’d left it; she caught up a champagne-colored silk dress from the wardrobe—she’d have to return with something, to bolster the story she’d told Alastair. She carried it downstairs before realizing that hauling around a heavy, beaded dress was not going to help her in her next endeavor. She’d leave it here, on the table near the door, and return for it when she was done.
The cold outside seemed more bitter compared with the warmth inside the house. She wondered idly where Effie had been—asleep downstairs, perhaps, or even out; it might well be her day off.
She touched the Lilith-protection amulet at her throat for reassurance as she reached the end of the street and ducked through an alley, which took her to the brick-lined narrow lanes of Shepherd Market. All was quiet, unusually so: too late for any shopping, too early for the mundanes who prowled this lane at night. Ahead of her rose Ye Grapes, light spilling from its windows. Within the pub a few regulars sat and drank, unaware that just outside was the place her father had been murdered.